Friday, April 13, 2007

SavaJe

In the news: Sun acquires SavaJe Technologies, whose product is a Java-based embedded OS. The combination of the words "Java" and "mobile" normally makes my stomach turn, but SavaJe Mobile Platform is supposed to have better performance than regular mobile Java implementations, as the whole OS is built around the Java VM. The Java API is the native API. It'd be interesting to actually try out a phone running SavaJe OS and see what it can do, but unfortunately there doesn't seem to be more than one handset that uses it at the moment. This could potentially be a competitor for Symbian, Linux etc., but in this day and age I think it might be a bit problematic to persuade phone manufacturers to try out yet another OS. But if it performs as well as they say, developing the whole system in Java might make the whole process easier. And they support JSR-209 (Swing), which almost makes mobile Java seem like a good idea. Those who have written UI:s in both AWT and Swing know what I'm talking about.